white cape, as his sister was of Mr.
Davis. It was really a very pretty dress of the Bride's, and one that
made our traveling costumes look uncommonly shabby: it was taken up
behind in the approved style, and only needed a bustle to have been
truly effective. Doubtless she had seen plenty of those articles in
Stockholm, only her husband said, "I hope, dear, you will never put on
one of those horrid things;" and she told him certainly not if he did
not like them; but I think she found afterward she needed one for
that blue dress, and sent for it at the first opportunity. The young
husband was not got up for show, knowing very well that no one would
mind him, but he looked beamingly happy; and if he was not in a
dress-coat with a flower in his buttonhole, like the _habitues_ of
the Comedie Francaise or the Italiens, he understood how they use an
opera-glass there. The glass was a new acquisition that he had brought
home with him, and after practicing with it at the Royal Theatre in
the capital, he was fully prepared to stand up between the acts, with
his arm behind him in a negligently graceful attitude, and study
the balcony. His acquaintances there must have found it rather
embarrassing, for it was not a usual thing in Carlstad to look at
one's friends through an opera-glass: he was the only person who did
it, and they probably all talked about it when they went home.

We were so occupied with our surroundings that we hardly thought of
the piece, though it was given with considerable spirit, if I remember
rightly. The sailors were fine, jolly tars, and the Chinese ladies
and gentlemen toddled about in flowered dressing-gowns and talked
with their thumbs, as it would appear the inhabitants of the Celestial
Empire usually do; but the house did not allow itself to be betrayed
into unseemly enthusiasm. There was an involuntary laugh now and then,
and once somebody said _bravo_, but as a general thing a discreet
reticence prevailed, and the actors might have gone through the piece
on their heads in an extravagant desire to elicit signs of approval:
they would only have received a cool little round of applause when the
curtain fell.

We, at all events, had no hesitation in telling the commissioner that
we had enjoyed ourselves immensely; and so, it appeared, had he. He
was even bold enough to call it a very fine company, and as we walked
back to the hotel at half-past nine in broad daylight, he told us what
they were going